


Narcissus Weeps

by draculard



Category: A Fine and Private Place - Peter S. Beagle
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 14:14:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18316895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: Rebeck has grown accustomed to meeting ghosts in Yorkshire Cemetery, but not to meeting ghosts who share his face.





	Narcissus Weeps

**Author's Note:**

> "Narcissus weeps to find that his image does not return his love."  
> — Mason Cooley

The snowflakes are fat and fluffy but the wind seems to think it’s participating in a hurricane. As soon as Rebeck steps outside his mausoleum that morning, he’s blinded by what seems at first to be an entire snowball in his eyes. He wipes it away; the wind replaces it.

He goes back inside.

In the winter, Yorkchester Cemetery is almost unlivable, but Rebeck has managed it for fifteen years now and he supposes he’ll keep on managing it as long as he can. A thick layer of discarded clothes and blankets keeps the coldness from seeping in through the concrete floor. The main issue, of course, is that the crow won’t fly to see him through this wind. It would batter him back to the ground like a vengeful god.

Which means Rebeck won’t be eating anything today.

Again.

It’s well past 10 a.m. when Rebeck finally steels himself against the winter wind and braves the long journey to Yorkchester’s outdoor restroom. A mile walk will do him good in this kind of weather — it will remind him to appreciate the relative warmth of his mausoleum.

He steps out of the mausoleum, kicking his way through a drift of unreasonably thick snow. The wind bites at him instantly, leaving what feels like icicles inside his nose. His ears seem to grow numb and fall off his head before he can even take a step.

 _Once more unto the breach,_ Rebeck thinks.

Halfway to the restroom, he wishes he had snowshoes. He squints at an enormous shape lurking in the distance, half-hidden by a wall of swirling snowflakes, hoping it might be the fabled outbuilding, but as he gets closer he realizes it’s just a backhoe parked near a fresh stone, and he hurries past so the gravediggers won’t see him.

By the time he sees the little brick building emerging from the gale of snow, he wishes he’d just peed outside the mausoleum. He hurries through the heavy bathroom door, stamping the snow off his feet once he’s inside and safe from the wind. He shakes the snowflakes out of his hair.

Miraculously, the water that surges from the taps is so hot it leaves a burning sensation on Rebeck’s hands. He watches his skin turn red beneath the stream. Eventually, as the warmth travels up his arms and through his body, he realizes the water isn’t anything special after all; it isn’t even letting off steam. He’s just so cold that anything seems hot at the moment.

He spends a long time in the restroom. It depresses him to even think of returning to his mausoleum. And the floor in here is tile, which means it doesn’t even require a carpet of clothes to keep the cold out.

(Which isn’t to say, necessarily, that sitting on the restroom floor is comfortable.)

He sits in the corner with his knees pulled up to his chest and his arms crossed, thinking of nothing in particular. A little about the crow and whether it’s found a warm place to nest during the storm, a little about the backhoe he saw parked in the cemetery during his walk to the restroom. He stands up periodically, shaking the pins and needles out of his legs, and runs the warm-ish water over his hands.

He washes his face, then wishes he hadn’t, as the water quickly cools and leaves him shivering. He tears a brown paper towel out of the dispenser and dries his face with it, leaving little particles and an unpleasant, artificial scent on his skin.

He’s as warm as he’s going to get, Rebeck admits to himself. His watch is broken, but the sun is high outside, cold and pale though it appears. It must be at least noon, and the wind has died down quite a bit -- now’s as optimal a time as ever to trek back home.

Still, it’s hard to convince himself. He sighs more than once, letting each deep inhale and exhale soothe him, and squares his shoulders.

Then shakes them loose, then squares them again, then sighs for the fourth time and forces himself out the door.

The snow is falling gently now, each flake floating slowly enough that Rebeck can catch whichever ones he pleases on his palm. He kicks his way through the path, sending snow flying in clumps with his feet. His shoes are soaked through already, and he’s not even ten feet down the path.

As he winds his way back to the mausoleum, he keeps an eye out for the backhoe or the gravediggers’ truck, but neither is in sight. It’s possible he imagined it; it’s possible he didn’t.

When he finally reaches the mausoleum, his legs are aching and his arms are sore; it feels like someone has stabbed a thick needle into the small of his back; his stomach has gone past its typical feeling of emptiness into a thick, unpleasant, heavy sensation, like it’s decided to quit complaining and is instead focused on exacting revenge for not being fed.

Rebeck sees someone out of the corner of his eye as he opens the mausoleum door; he ducks inside quickly, praying that they haven’t seen him, but he’s so cold and tired that he can’t muster up his typically anxiety. Instead of keeping watch over the barred window, he sinks into his mattress made of old clothes, pulls the blankets over him, and falls asleep.

* * *

_Hello?_

Rebeck lies inside a nest of blankets, his eyes closed. For a moment, he’s so pleasantly warm it seems unreal.

_Hello? Is anybody there?_

There’s a high, clear voice somewhere nearby, Rebeck realizes. He cracks open an eye and stares at the grey mausoleum wall. The sun isn’t quite gone yet; a beam of dark blue light is playing on the stones. Rebeck rolls over, immediately losing some of his warmth, and stares out the window. A tiny sliver of a moon is visible in the sky.

He rests his head back against a folded shirt, eyes closing again but not succumbing to sleep. He doesn’t allow himself to relax completely; his neck is still tense, ears perked as he listens for the voice again.

Minutes stretch on without a sound. Peevish and now fully awake, Rebeck sits up on his elbows, hair mussed, and looks about the mausoleum. There was something odd about that voice — something familiar to him, in a strange way. It was less like a sound and more like an echo, or like the ‘sounds’ he conceives of when he tries to remember a particular song he enjoyed on the radio before he came to live in Yorkchester and could only listen to grave-side hymns.

It’s the sound of a ghost’s voice.

Rebeck’s mind tracks backward, sleepily dusting off his few notable memories from today until he reaches the backhoe and the new stone he’d seen on his walk.

Well, time to greet the dead.

He wraps his blankets tighter around himself and takes them with him when he stands, shuffling to the door in a cocoon of worn, musty fabric. Once the door is open a crack, he peeks outside. The snow has stopped entirely, but the cemetery is blanketed in white, with little mounds of it marking the stones and statues.

“Hello?” Rebeck says. His own voice sounds strange to him, but he shrugs off the feeling and waits for the answer.

Silently, a boy steps into view.

* * *

They sit across the chessboard from each other. Rebeck’s hands are tucked into the blankets, his eyes cast down on the board. He can feel the boy staring at him, but he doesn’t favor him with a returned glance.

Rebeck is pale and colder than he’s ever been. He cannot look up at the boy. He focuses on the chessboard entirely, staring at it so hard that his eyes unfocus and everything becomes blurry.

The boy’s first three moves are made with foolish confidence — he jumps a pawn with his knight as an opener, taking it to A3. With his next move, he takes the same knight to B5, seemingly content to ignore Rebeck’s own moves. On his third go, he moves the knight to D6 and looks up at Rebeck with a triumphant smile.

Rebeck ignores it. He takes the boy’s knight with his king’s side bishop, which he freed with his first move. He can see the boy’s smile fall, replaced by a puzzled frown, out of his peripheral vision.

The boy expected to win with those three moves. Most likely, he’s only ever played children his own age, none of them with any formal training beyond the simplest rules of chess. He’s never lost with that combination.

Rebeck knows this because those were the same three moves he used as a boy until he joined Chess Club in middle school.

And this boy is identical to him in every way.

He has the tanned skin of Rebeck’s youth, most of it spent outdoors — the white-blond hair which would have darkened as he aged — the blue eyes, the stick-thin frame, the malevolent-looking bowl-cut Rebeck’s mother inflicted on him from the ages of two through ten, when she died and Rebeck’s hair grew wild and long.  

He wears a patched red sweater Rebeck remembers from his youth. He lost it in third grade — left it hanging on a bush during the spring, after he decided it was warm enough to take it off for recess. Beneath that is a corduroy shirt which lasted Rebeck until his first teenage growth spurt. He wears short trousers — he can’t be more than eight years old.

It’s a long time before Rebeck works up the courage to address what he sees.

“What’s your name?” he asks the boy. He watches as the boy’s nose — so similar to his own, before age inflated it — wrinkles and he shakes his head.

 _Don’t remember,_ he says, then quickly adds, _sir._

“Don’t remember,” Rebeck repeats, nodding as if to say, _of course not_. He tries not to let on how much that troubles him; of course, many ghosts forget their names, some of them quite quickly. He roots around for another question to ask the boy. “Were you buried today?” seems like a good one.

But the boy just shrugs.

“I saw a backhoe in the—” Rebeck stumbles over the words he wants to say, which are ‘the poorer section,’ but such a phrase seems insensitive. “—in the other part of the cemetery,” he finishes. “Do you think that was for you?”

 _What’s a backhoe?_ says the boy. Rebeck eyes him, especially his old-fashioned clothes, and wonders if he himself knew what a backhoe was at that age, or if they’d even been invented yet.

“It’s a large machine used to dig graves,” he says.

 _Am I dead, then?_ says the boy, unbothered. Rebeck eyes him even harder, unsure how to answer.

“To all intents and purposes,” he says neutrally. It occurs to him (a little late) that he may be hallucinating. Perhaps he’s still wrapped in his blankets on the mausoleum floor, delirious from hypothermia. He brushes off this fantasy with a shake of his head. “Tell me about yourself,” he says to the boy.

The boy stares at the chessboard, chewing his lip, and says nothing.

“What about your parents?” Rebeck prompts. “What are they like?”

 _Dunno,_ says the boy. He moves a pawn aimlessly and settles back against the wall. _Sir,_ he adds.

“You don’t remember them?” Rebeck asks. The boy considers it a little more seriously, but the end result is still a shrug.

 _Mom cuts my hair,_ he says, eyes flickering up to Rebeck for signs of approval.

 _Well, I could have told you that,_ thinks Rebeck. Still, the boy is waiting on his reaction, so he forces a quick smile.

“Do you remember how you died?” he asks. He doesn’t expect much of an answer, but the boy surprises him — he moves his bishop (illegally, but Rebeck lets it slide) and says,

_I went out swimming in the murky old pond in the park._

Rebeck tries very hard not to remember the many, many summer days he spent swimming in a murky old pond in a park.

“You drowned?” he asks.

 _My arms and legs got heavy,_ says the boy. _I fell asleep underwater. When I woke up there was mud and seaweed in my mouth and fishes swimming all around me._

“Seaweed doesn’t grow in ponds,” Rebeck corrects automatically. His mind is focused on the rest of the boy’s sentence; does he remember almost drowning when he was a child, perhaps no more than eight? Or is he imagining it? Surely he didn’t remember such an event just twenty minutes ago; is this an organic remembrance, the boy’s words dislodging old, neglected memories from his brain, or is he falling victim to the power of suggestion?

 _It does so grow in ponds, sir,_ says the boy. _It was in my mouth. I oughtta know._

“Right,” says Rebeck. “My mistake — so if you went swimming, it must have been warm out, yes?”

The boy doesn’t bother to answer such a stupid question.

“So you couldn’t have been buried today, could you?” Rebeck says. “Unless your body was only recently found. What else do you remember from the water?”

The boy looks up at him briefly, chewing the inside of his cheek as he thinks. _All my skin came off,_ he says, as though this is the most natural thing in the world to remember. _And my bones were sticking through._

“Oh,” says Rebeck. He wonders how polite it would be to take back his question before the boy elaborates more.

 _There were fishes swimming through me,_ says the boy, touching his ribs. _And nipping at me, too, but I couldn’t really feel it. I just imagined I could._

“Oh,” says Rebeck, feeling slightly more nauseated than he did a moment ago. “Well, that’s … very….”

 _My mother came looking for me,_ says the boy. _She came to the pond because she knew I liked to swim there. But she didn’t go rooting around at the bottom, so she didn’t find me. I came up when it got cold out, because I wanted to see the ice._

“And someone saw you then?” Rebeck asks. He feels dreadfully cold — cold past the point of shivering. The blanket does nothing for him anymore; it's like he's wrapped himself in a sheet made out of snow.

 _A little girl,_ says the boy. _Skating on the ice._

He looks at Rebeck, his mouth compressed into a thin line that changes the shape of his face, makes him seem years older than he really is. Rebeck closes his eyes, unwilling to see that face any longer.

 _Are you afraid of the city, sir?_ he asks. _Sometimes I am. I wish I could run away and live in the graveyard, too._

Rebeck swallows, his throat dry. He takes the boy’s king without a word.

He asks no more questions.

The boy says no more.

* * *

 

When the crow brings him food, the weather has gone into a mood swing, sending temperatures up to the forties. Icicles have disappeared from the trees; the graves are wet with melted snow; the grass peeks through whatever small clumps of it are still left, green in some spots and brown in others.

Rebeck takes the sandwich dropped into his lap and tears into it without a word of thanks, merely nodding at the crow with his mouth full. It eyes him, though he can't be sure exactly what expression is on its face.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" it asks eventually, its voice scratching its way down Rebeck's ears like a migraine with bird-ish claws. "You look more fucked up than usual."

Rebeck thumps his chest, forcing a bite of the sandwich down his throat.

"Don't know what you mean," he says. 

"Paler than usual," says the crow. It hops forward, laying its talons on his leg. "Thin. Looks like the storm blew you away."

Rebeck just shrugs. "It was a bad storm," he says, his tone even, giving nothing away. He peels the crust off his sandwich and eats that first, trying to make it last. "Been a few days without food, though," he says; the crow opens its beak to defend itself, and Rebeck hurriedly adds, "Not that I'm ungrateful. Just that it made me tired. I slept right through the worst of it, and now it looks like spring has come."

"And thank God for that," says the crow. If it notices the hollows around Rebeck's eyes, it doesn't say so. He separates the two slices of bread from each other, grabs a pickle from the midst of the sentence, and chews it thoughtfully.

"Awful lot of nightmares, though," he says tentatively. "While I was sleeping."

"Too bad," says the crow, not sounding sympathetic at all. "Eat your fucking sandwich, Rebeck. I'll bring you some dinner later, too. Since you can't take care of your own goddamn self."

Rebeck simply nods. The crow watches him, waiting for a reaction, and then shakes out its wings impatiently when it gets none. It takes to the air, landing on the roof of the mausoleum, and pauses there to look at Rebeck one last time before it flies off for good.

"Get some rest, Rebeck," it says. "You look like you've seen a ghost."


End file.
